The judge of the Investigating Court number 13 of Barcelona has decided that a report by the Mossos d'Esquadra in which the Catalan police investigators suspected that the former head of Barça's legal services, Roman Gómez Ponti, and the former general director of the club, Òscar Grau, would be behind the leak of Leo Messi's contract to the newspaper El Mundo.
According to the Mossos, the former president Josep Maria Bartomeu could be aware of this leak by the two of the senior executives of the final stage of his mandate and they considered that he could have committed a crime of revealing secrets. Something that Bartomeu had always denied.
Bartomeu's defense considered that this controversial report was in no way related to the Barçagate case. And he protested so that it was not taken into account. Now Judge Alejandra Gil has opted for the informative office not to be incorporated into the summary. This was also what Gómez Ponti and Grau had claimed.
The magistrate recalls in her order that the emptying and dumping of the mobile phones and computers of the three involved was ordered to obtain information from Barçagate and that the collection of information should be limited to files that "could have a direct relationship with the facts". “At no time was any indiscriminate data study authorized,” she notes.
For this reason, the conversations between Bartomeu, Gómez Ponti and Grau in the days after the publication by El Mundo of Messi's contract with Barcelona, in which the former head of legal services came to classify the Rosario as a "sewer rat" , they are not considered part of Barçagate.
It must be remembered that this case refers to the splitting of invoices in order to avoid the internal controls of FC Barcelona for the hiring of a series of companies to discredit players and people from the Barcelona environment on social networks.
On January 31, 2021, the newspaper El Mundo revealed the contract between the Argentine star and FC Barcelona, reporting that the Barça club had to pay the Argentine player a maximum of 555,237,619 euros gross in four seasons.
